Health Issues

The recent death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro brought forth a grotesque encomium from the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who asserted "Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation." The reality is very different: Hep C is communicated by blood transfusions, patients' families have to bring their own sheets and soap to hospitals, which sometimes lack electricity, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

This morning's jobs report maintained the trend of high growth in health services, which grew 1.5 times faster than non-health jobs. With 28,000 jobs added, health services accounted for almost one in six of 178,000 new jobs. The disproportionately high share of job growth in health services is a deliberate outcome of Obamacare, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

Donald Trump’s health reform proposal during the presidential campaign promised to deliver price transparency to health care. Doctors and hospitals are infamously terrible at sharing price information with patients. It is a problem for both scheduled procedures and visits to emergency rooms. The root problem is that prices are not formed through a normal market process, but administratively determined between government, insurers, and providers, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

Donald Trump's choice of Dr. Tom Price as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services indicates the Trump Administration will make a serious effort to repeal and replace Obamacare with patient-centered health reform. Obamacare's opponents can now be confident that skilled leadership will wage a sophisticated and likely successful effort to restart health reform. Senior Fellow John R. Graham shows four reasons why...

The Economist has estimated health status explains the Trump vote better than being a non-college educated white citizen does. The sicker you are, the more likely you are to have voted for Mr. Trump. The people who should have been most grateful for Obamacare rejected it in the 2016 election, more than they had in 2012, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

Now that repeal of Obamacare is within striking distance, Obamacare's supporters and the media are aghast at over 20 million people potentially losing their overly expensive health insurance. If Republican politicians cannot overcome this objection, they will never move forward with repealing and replacing Obamacare, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

President-elect Donald Trump made repealing Obamacare the cornerstone of his campaign. Now that he has won, his future administration is faced with the daunting task of unraveling nearly seven years of Obamacare, writes NCPA Senior Fellow Devon Herrick for Townhall...

A new report ranks research-based pharmaceutical companies on a number of measurements of how they make medicines available to patients in low-income countries. Philanthropic enterprises (such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) are entering these partnerships with for-profit drug makers. It is a far healthier development than the old-fashioned approach of just beating up drug makers for their greed, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

Critics of Obamacare who focus on its increasing the proportion of people dependent on Medicaid (a welfare program) ignore the great expansion of Medicaid dependency years before anyone had heard of Barack Obama, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...

Bill Clinton recently referred to high marginal income tax rates that Obamacare imposes on workers through the design of its tax credits, which get clawed back in a very unfair way. The Administration recently confessed premiums for the benchmark Obamacare plans are going up 25 percent, on average. Trying to appease angry enrollees, the Administration feebly claims tax credits reduce net premiums people pay, writes NCPA Senior Fellow John R. Graham...